So the NSA is performing actual wiretaps and widescale data collection which violates the Constitution and they are facing absolutely no penalties or even pressure from any other branch of government to stop this behavior yet Google is being punished for "wiretapping" by collecting information that was voluntarily broadcasted on public airwaves. At first this didn't make any sense until I remembered Google's recent efforts to encrypt users' data to make it tougher to be collected by government agencies. I guess that's the price they're going to pay for trying to force the government to obey its own Constitution.
1. Tesla's dealerships do not cost "nothing"... they have to lease building space, hire employees, etc. That all costs something and its paid for through car sales. As such, there is a margin in the cost of the car that goes RIGHT NOW to tesla dealerships. So you could afford to pay the middle man something without increasing the cost of the car or reducing Tesla's profit margin.
You are absolutely right, Tesla's dealerships add cost just like an independent dealership would. However, you are underestimating the amount of markup independent dealerships would want on top of the cost of the car. With Tesla selling them direct, they can run their dealerships at cost or even a loss while they try to convert customers from gas-powered cars to electric.
2. There are many different types of contracts. The dealers could buy the cars from Tesla and then resell them at whatever cost they want. Or the cars could be taken in on commission. The dealer would pay NOTHING for the cars upfront but would take a percentage of the sale value of the car. Tesla could specify a fixed sale price if they really cared about that.
Again, there is still a middleman looking to make significant profits on top of the profits Tesla needs to re-invest into designing and producing new models. That markup would drive up the total price of the car for the customer and thereby slow down sales for Tesla.
3. This has very little do with money and a great deal more to do with market control and brand image. Tesla is a hyper premium car company and they don't want dealers representing their brand. They want to represent their brand and no one else. THAT is why they want to sell the cars themselves. AND AGAIN, I have no problem with that. They have every right in my opinion to represent their cars anyway they like.
I fully agree - hence my point about Tesla controlling the buying experience.
My ONLY point here is that if they wanted to sell their cars they could do so just like everyone else. They don't want to do it that way. Which AGAIN, I sympathize with... but don't tell me they can't sell the cars. They can. They just cant' open their own dealerships. Which is stupid. But that's stupid regulations on businesses and industries for you.
I never said they couldn't sell them through dealerships nor have I heard Tesla say that because everyone knows that they could. The point is that they are at a critical juncture in their existence. They need to sell enough cars to survive while they try to develop electric cars that are cheap enough for the average person. They also need to hang on long enough for advancements in batteries to come along and make the technology cheaper since that is one of the most expensive components of the car. Every penny counts right now. The company is obviously doing many things right, but they have a ways to go before they will be able to produce a car affordable for the average person, so they're trying to keep the sale price down as low as possible to sell as many cars as they can and subsidize development of future vehicles.
Think that's dumb? Did you know we have a national Raisin reserve? Yep. Every year, raisin producers by law must give up a percentage of their crop to the federal government for the raisin reserve. The percentage is entirely arbitrary and is set by some faceless government department no one cares about. I think a few times the percentage was 30 percent.
Think about that. Imagine giving up 30 percent of your crop... and then paying income tax. For the raisin reserve.
Point is there are a lot of really really stupid laws and most of them came out of the great depression or immediately there after. There was a lot of economic experimentalism that went on after that and much of it was just idiotic. Since, a good deal of that legislation has been mercifully shitcanned. B
Yes, it is manageable, but the irony is that the current system that requires dealerships to sell cars in an attempt to keep costs down by preventing monopoly abuse of car manufacturers would actually cause the price of Tesla cars to go up. That, of course, is because the dealership is a middleman that is out to make as much profit as possible by jacking up the price of the cars. In addition to that, I'm sure Tesla would love to drastically improving the purchasing experience by selling their cars directly at the lowest possible price and prevent their customers from having to haggle with salesmen to avoid getting completely raked over the coals
Well, he has the advantage of the fact that five major publishers realized that this was blatant price fixing and settled out of court because they knew they had absolutely no case.
And the fact that Steve Jobs sent out an e-mail that was so damning of Apple's behavior that a representative of one of the publishers they were colluding with called the act of sending such an e-mail "stupid".
And the fact that the court already ruled pretty clearly that Apple is guilty and Apple have not presented any facts that lead anyone to believe anything to the contrary.
Sometimes your bias toward a company can prevent you from seeing truths that are obvious to people who don't hold those biases. When it comes to predictions, I will always take the ones that make the most rational sense and that come from people that don't have an outstanding bias towards or against a company.
What should also be legal, is for publishers to say "you cannot sell my book for less than $X".
No, that is the very definition of price fixing and it is illegal because it violates the entire concept of the free market in which prices are set by the market. Companies have the freedom to sell to anyone they want at any price they want, but it is illegal for them to dictate what price the product is resold. That is precisely what Apple was colluding with the publishers to attempt to do and the court rightly found them guilty of it.
1. To charge an iPhone, you take an iPhone charging cable and plug it into any old USB charger. Fits into a Samsung USB charger without any problems.
And if you forget the "iPhone charging cable" on the go, you can't borrow a standard USB cable which are pretty ubiquitous to recharge your phone, you need to find someone that has the proprietary cable.
2. iPhone does cloud backup and syncing without any problems. No need for any computer with iTunes anywhere near it.
Can the iPhone now play Flac and OGG files and other open source formats without transcoding? If not, do you need to go through iTunes and spend hours transcoding your collection? That's obviously not an issue for people who get everything from the iTMS, but there is little excuse not to support these formats given that the code is widely available. But Apple prefers to force their users to use their proprietary formats. For a company that prides itself on providing a good user experience, this behavior is clearly putting Apple's desires ahead of their users.
3. Contacts and calendar syncing with commonly used products (Contacts and calendar on the Mac) works great.
How well does that work on Windows? From what I've heard, that experience is significantly degraded.
4. Control of what applications can be put on your phone is counted as a positive by the majority of users.
This is subject to change as more apps come out for Android phones that are barred from the Apple store due to "offensive content" where "offensive content" is defined solely by Apple. Think "adult apps" as well as apps with a twisted sense of humor. Apple may still have that aura of "the cool company" now, but all it takes is one popular app available on Android phones that Apple prohibits on iPhones and Apple will look like a bunch of dictators trying to prevent adults from enjoying products with a mature nature or sense of humor.
5. I haven't seen any users calling the iOS user interface "clumsy", and "not much customisability" is seen as a positive by the majority of users.
I agree, I wouldn't call the iOS interface clumsy, but it is restrictive as hell. On my Android phone, I have the top news stories, my stocks, the weather, and my calendar all on home screens that I scroll through with a simple swipe that lets me put my finger on the pulse of all that I care about with a few quick swipes. In addition to that, I have shortcuts to only my favorite apps on the home screen rather than shortcuts to all my apps cluttering up my home screen with icons I rarely use. But interface preference is always subjective - to each their own.
In a brief filed in federal court, the NRA argues that the National Security Agency's database of phone records amounts to a 'national gun registry
This may be the most ludicrous argument I have ever heard. With that said, the NRA is extremely effective at forcing themselves onto the legislative system and repeatedly gang-banging it until they're raw and left shooting only puffs of dust. With support like that, it might almost be possible to get the current amount of unconstitutional spying scaled back.
The story that I read was that they had several angel investors fronting most of their money before production of the Model S, but the banks backing those loans for the angel investors reneged after the crash in 2008. Tesla's options were to either fold or apply for government loans. The government was hesitant at first, especially after all of the bad press about Solyndra, but after they bailed out sinking ships like GM who bled billions for six straight quarters, the money to Tesla was peanuts in comparison. In any event, Tesla's plan from the very start was focused solely on private investors until the crash caused them to change course.
Yeah. It's almost like the patent is necessary to implement a standard (P2P). And if that's the case, then shouldn't VirnetX be forced to license the technology to Apple for a mere pittance under FRAND terms?
As many people have already stated, this is likely due to the revelation of the depth of NSA spying. The irony lies in the fact that the X-KEYSCORE software that the NSA uses to determine which traffic to log specifically targets Tor traffic. Therefore, these people are probably drawing more attention to themselves by using Tor than by not using it. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if Tor guaranteed anonymity but based on the articles I've been reading lately, it seems like people with sufficient resources can defeat Tor's methods of anonymization.
This article hits the nail right on the head. In addition to the content in the article, I believe that strong laws regarding Intellectual Property have indoctrinated the public at large to believe that ideas are worth more than they are. These people focus on the idea itself while minimizing all of the effort that went into the research, design, and testing phases that took years of refinement before leading to the final product. It is the public's overvalue of abstract ideas that have allowed for the vast expansion of patents and copyright to reach beyond their original intent of covering the concrete details of a particular implementation. The simple truth is that execution is worth a million times more than the idea. Great ideas often fail due to poor execution and mediocre ideas can be massively successful due to exceptional execution. We should be working to loosen the tight grip of IP laws so that abstract ideas can be implemented by as many parties as possible while the concrete details of their finished products remain properly protected.
This reminds me of when the internet was new and my relatives were amazed when I told them I did most of my Christmas shopping online. They couldn't believe that I trusted web sites on the internet with my credit card number and they said they had absolutely no interest in doing that. The very next year, most of those same relatives were raving about how convenient it was to shop at home and not fight car and foot traffic to buy gifts. The point is, people fear new things that they don't understand, but once they see the benefits and convenience of new technologies, it usually isn't long before they consider life without that technology as primitive.
The obvious flaw in your argument is that trading costs have gone down due to electronic trading which is different from high-frequency trading. With electronic trading, instead of brokers having to call other brokers to make the trades, buyers and sellers can be found almost instantaneously to fill orders. That is a good thing and no one is arguing against that. What people hate is how high-frequency trading is used to underhandedly find a buyer's maximum buy price and the seller's minimum sell price so that the traders can keep the difference in addition to charging their commission fees. HFT is not required for a company to participate in electronic trading and yet it is prevalent throughout the market because Wall Street owns Capitol Hill. And I wouldn't be surprised if this shutdown was caused by a HFT algorithm that went haywire, although there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that at the moment.
I thought the same thing when the first generation XBox came out. What I failed to realize was:
- It is a hell of a lot easier to manage updates to the OS, firmware, drivers, and games on a console hooked up to a large-screen tv with a proper 10-foot interface than a PC
- There is a convenience to having a separate box that's DRM'ed instead of having games trying to own my PC
- That DRM allows for the purchase and sale of used games that isn't available on the PC, not to mention borrowing games without having DRM to circumvent
- The console provides a unified interface for social gaming. I can see what games other friends are playing and join in their session or send them a message to try to convince them to play a different game
- I can be sure that games on a console perform reasonably well without having to upgrade any hardware
I'm not trying to say that there aren't advantages to playing games on the PC. I'm just providing counter-arguments to the growing belief that a significant number of console gamers are going to switch to the PC for next-gen games.
Why should an athlete profit from EA's work when they contributed absolutely no effort towards the development of the game? Did this athlete compile all of his own statistics and provide them to EA? Did he pose for pictures of his likeness to be textured onto the character model? Did he provide motion capture data for this game? Then why should he receive one cent when he contributed no work to the product? I'm really tired of people expecting to be paid for things such as their "likeness" because it's not something that makes sense to own. For anybody who thinks otherwise, consider how many people look alike and imagine all of those people start putting their hands out every time they look similar to a rendered character in a movie, tv show, video game, etc. And if you still think you own your likeness, then what happens in the case of identical twins?
That is all they would have to do to get you back (as well as some of the other die-hard Nintendo fans). But there are a lot of other people who won't buy the console at all due to the lack of third-party support. Those people are too busy playing the tons of games available for the Xbox 360 and PS3 as well as anticipating their successors. As great as Nintendo games are, it's a lot to ask of someone to buy a console where the only worthwhile titles are first-party. And it's a lot to ask of Nintendo to create enough first-party games to compete with the huge library of games available on Microsoft and Sony's systems.
The last time I stopped by my Mom's house, I was surprised to see that she had an old laptop running Ubuntu and XBMC hooked up to her TV. Apparently my uncle had the laptop laying around and decided she could use it as a home theater PC. I thought my Mom would be lost in an environment outside of Windows, but she seemed to learn the interface pretty quickly and rarely complains about it. I think with the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and other devices with different interfaces is making users less technophobic than they used to be and they are slightly more willing to learn new interfaces. What I'm trying to say is that 2013 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Nintendo did this to themselves when they abandoned hardcore gamers to cater to casual games with the Wii. That move will always come back to bite you because the casual users are fickle while hardcore gamers will get you through the rough times. And sure enough, casual gamers have moved on to Facebook, tablets, and smartphones, and Nintendo doesn't have anyone left to sell consoles. I used to buy Nintendo consoles because I could play most of the great games available on other systems as well as Nintendo's excellent titles. But ever since the Wii, Nintendo lost most of the decent third-party developers which meant that hardcore gamers would have to buy the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 to be able to play those games. When that happened, many of the developers and the gamers haven't looked back. Luckily for Nintendo, they're still selling decent numbers of portable units, but the Wii U is in serious trouble. There's no doubt that it will pick up a bit when more first-party titles come out and after an inevitable price drop, but right now most of the hype is around the Xbone and PS4. At this point, I just don't see them making a miraculous comeback and I can't help but wonder if this is their last console. If they did another console, it would have to be absolutely revolutionary - my vote is for a fully immersive virtual reality experience, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that.
Imagine term limits for Congress - the state reps would pass that because it would mean more churn and a chance for them to get there
That would do virtually nothing to stop the problem of systemic bribery in our legislative process. The only thing that would change is which asshole is having his pockets stuffed with cash every few years. If you want to stop bribery, then just outlaw bribery!
I am so sick of the argument that bribing politicians and subverting the democratic process is protected under the First Amendment. It was shocking when the Supreme Court ruled that in the Citizen's United case and it's even more shocking that there exist idiots who bought into the concept. You are free to use your speech to write your current Congressman as well as support a new one in an upcoming election, but there should be strict limits against bribing candidates to gain an unfair advantage over of your views over the rest of the constituents. Many of the other civilized countries in the world already recognize the need to curtail bribing, but for some reason, we in the Land of the Free can't get enough of it.
It's not just the animations and color scheme that put me off. The monochromatic icons completely abandon the utility of color in helping to differentiate the icons. And the non-uniform tile sizes inject unnecessary visual inconsistencies (and I don't think that can be modified). And overall, the home screen is just not customizable enough to make it my own. My Android phone currently lets me display the weather, news headlines, stocks, calendar, and much more on the desktop which allows me to get a variety of different information with hardly any effort. However, I feel that the overall quality of Android is going down in the past year or two and I would be willing to switch to another platform if I could find one as flexible as Android. Unfortunately, Windows Phone does not currently fit that bill.
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So the NSA is performing actual wiretaps and widescale data collection which violates the Constitution and they are facing absolutely no penalties or even pressure from any other branch of government to stop this behavior yet Google is being punished for "wiretapping" by collecting information that was voluntarily broadcasted on public airwaves. At first this didn't make any sense until I remembered Google's recent efforts to encrypt users' data to make it tougher to be collected by government agencies. I guess that's the price they're going to pay for trying to force the government to obey its own Constitution.
You are absolutely right, Tesla's dealerships add cost just like an independent dealership would. However, you are underestimating the amount of markup independent dealerships would want on top of the cost of the car. With Tesla selling them direct, they can run their dealerships at cost or even a loss while they try to convert customers from gas-powered cars to electric.
Again, there is still a middleman looking to make significant profits on top of the profits Tesla needs to re-invest into designing and producing new models. That markup would drive up the total price of the car for the customer and thereby slow down sales for Tesla.
I fully agree - hence my point about Tesla controlling the buying experience.
I never said they couldn't sell them through dealerships nor have I heard Tesla say that because everyone knows that they could. The point is that they are at a critical juncture in their existence. They need to sell enough cars to survive while they try to develop electric cars that are cheap enough for the average person. They also need to hang on long enough for advancements in batteries to come along and make the technology cheaper since that is one of the most expensive components of the car. Every penny counts right now. The company is obviously doing many things right, but they have a ways to go before they will be able to produce a car affordable for the average person, so they're trying to keep the sale price down as low as possible to sell as many cars as they can and subsidize development of future vehicles.
Yes, it is manageable, but the irony is that the current system that requires dealerships to sell cars in an attempt to keep costs down by preventing monopoly abuse of car manufacturers would actually cause the price of Tesla cars to go up. That, of course, is because the dealership is a middleman that is out to make as much profit as possible by jacking up the price of the cars. In addition to that, I'm sure Tesla would love to drastically improving the purchasing experience by selling their cars directly at the lowest possible price and prevent their customers from having to haggle with salesmen to avoid getting completely raked over the coals
As a huge fan of Tesla Motors and Elon Musk, I'd have to say that it's probably a little of both.
Well, he has the advantage of the fact that five major publishers realized that this was blatant price fixing and settled out of court because they knew they had absolutely no case.
And the fact that Steve Jobs sent out an e-mail that was so damning of Apple's behavior that a representative of one of the publishers they were colluding with called the act of sending such an e-mail "stupid".
And the fact that the court already ruled pretty clearly that Apple is guilty and Apple have not presented any facts that lead anyone to believe anything to the contrary.
Sometimes your bias toward a company can prevent you from seeing truths that are obvious to people who don't hold those biases. When it comes to predictions, I will always take the ones that make the most rational sense and that come from people that don't have an outstanding bias towards or against a company.
No, that is the very definition of price fixing and it is illegal because it violates the entire concept of the free market in which prices are set by the market. Companies have the freedom to sell to anyone they want at any price they want, but it is illegal for them to dictate what price the product is resold. That is precisely what Apple was colluding with the publishers to attempt to do and the court rightly found them guilty of it.
And if you forget the "iPhone charging cable" on the go, you can't borrow a standard USB cable which are pretty ubiquitous to recharge your phone, you need to find someone that has the proprietary cable.
Can the iPhone now play Flac and OGG files and other open source formats without transcoding? If not, do you need to go through iTunes and spend hours transcoding your collection? That's obviously not an issue for people who get everything from the iTMS, but there is little excuse not to support these formats given that the code is widely available. But Apple prefers to force their users to use their proprietary formats. For a company that prides itself on providing a good user experience, this behavior is clearly putting Apple's desires ahead of their users.
How well does that work on Windows? From what I've heard, that experience is significantly degraded.
This is subject to change as more apps come out for Android phones that are barred from the Apple store due to "offensive content" where "offensive content" is defined solely by Apple. Think "adult apps" as well as apps with a twisted sense of humor. Apple may still have that aura of "the cool company" now, but all it takes is one popular app available on Android phones that Apple prohibits on iPhones and Apple will look like a bunch of dictators trying to prevent adults from enjoying products with a mature nature or sense of humor.
I agree, I wouldn't call the iOS interface clumsy, but it is restrictive as hell. On my Android phone, I have the top news stories, my stocks, the weather, and my calendar all on home screens that I scroll through with a simple swipe that lets me put my finger on the pulse of all that I care about with a few quick swipes. In addition to that, I have shortcuts to only my favorite apps on the home screen rather than shortcuts to all my apps cluttering up my home screen with icons I rarely use. But interface preference is always subjective - to each their own.
This may be the most ludicrous argument I have ever heard. With that said, the NRA is extremely effective at forcing themselves onto the legislative system and repeatedly gang-banging it until they're raw and left shooting only puffs of dust. With support like that, it might almost be possible to get the current amount of unconstitutional spying scaled back.
You must have very long legs!
The story that I read was that they had several angel investors fronting most of their money before production of the Model S, but the banks backing those loans for the angel investors reneged after the crash in 2008. Tesla's options were to either fold or apply for government loans. The government was hesitant at first, especially after all of the bad press about Solyndra, but after they bailed out sinking ships like GM who bled billions for six straight quarters, the money to Tesla was peanuts in comparison. In any event, Tesla's plan from the very start was focused solely on private investors until the crash caused them to change course.
Yeah. It's almost like the patent is necessary to implement a standard (P2P). And if that's the case, then shouldn't VirnetX be forced to license the technology to Apple for a mere pittance under FRAND terms?
As many people have already stated, this is likely due to the revelation of the depth of NSA spying. The irony lies in the fact that the X-KEYSCORE software that the NSA uses to determine which traffic to log specifically targets Tor traffic. Therefore, these people are probably drawing more attention to themselves by using Tor than by not using it. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if Tor guaranteed anonymity but based on the articles I've been reading lately, it seems like people with sufficient resources can defeat Tor's methods of anonymization.
This article hits the nail right on the head. In addition to the content in the article, I believe that strong laws regarding Intellectual Property have indoctrinated the public at large to believe that ideas are worth more than they are. These people focus on the idea itself while minimizing all of the effort that went into the research, design, and testing phases that took years of refinement before leading to the final product. It is the public's overvalue of abstract ideas that have allowed for the vast expansion of patents and copyright to reach beyond their original intent of covering the concrete details of a particular implementation. The simple truth is that execution is worth a million times more than the idea. Great ideas often fail due to poor execution and mediocre ideas can be massively successful due to exceptional execution. We should be working to loosen the tight grip of IP laws so that abstract ideas can be implemented by as many parties as possible while the concrete details of their finished products remain properly protected.
This reminds me of when the internet was new and my relatives were amazed when I told them I did most of my Christmas shopping online. They couldn't believe that I trusted web sites on the internet with my credit card number and they said they had absolutely no interest in doing that. The very next year, most of those same relatives were raving about how convenient it was to shop at home and not fight car and foot traffic to buy gifts. The point is, people fear new things that they don't understand, but once they see the benefits and convenience of new technologies, it usually isn't long before they consider life without that technology as primitive.
The obvious flaw in your argument is that trading costs have gone down due to electronic trading which is different from high-frequency trading. With electronic trading, instead of brokers having to call other brokers to make the trades, buyers and sellers can be found almost instantaneously to fill orders. That is a good thing and no one is arguing against that. What people hate is how high-frequency trading is used to underhandedly find a buyer's maximum buy price and the seller's minimum sell price so that the traders can keep the difference in addition to charging their commission fees. HFT is not required for a company to participate in electronic trading and yet it is prevalent throughout the market because Wall Street owns Capitol Hill. And I wouldn't be surprised if this shutdown was caused by a HFT algorithm that went haywire, although there doesn't seem to be any evidence of that at the moment.
The next step is to calculate the weight and density of the deposit and upload the data to the leaderboards so I won't have to keep doing it manually.
Uh, no, Apple doesn't pay taxes on the money it makes. It siphons that money over to Ireland in a tax avoidance scheme they helped pioneer.
I thought the same thing when the first generation XBox came out. What I failed to realize was:
- It is a hell of a lot easier to manage updates to the OS, firmware, drivers, and games on a console hooked up to a large-screen tv with a proper 10-foot interface than a PC
- There is a convenience to having a separate box that's DRM'ed instead of having games trying to own my PC
- That DRM allows for the purchase and sale of used games that isn't available on the PC, not to mention borrowing games without having DRM to circumvent
- The console provides a unified interface for social gaming. I can see what games other friends are playing and join in their session or send them a message to try to convince them to play a different game
- I can be sure that games on a console perform reasonably well without having to upgrade any hardware
I'm not trying to say that there aren't advantages to playing games on the PC. I'm just providing counter-arguments to the growing belief that a significant number of console gamers are going to switch to the PC for next-gen games.
Why should an athlete profit from EA's work when they contributed absolutely no effort towards the development of the game? Did this athlete compile all of his own statistics and provide them to EA? Did he pose for pictures of his likeness to be textured onto the character model? Did he provide motion capture data for this game? Then why should he receive one cent when he contributed no work to the product? I'm really tired of people expecting to be paid for things such as their "likeness" because it's not something that makes sense to own. For anybody who thinks otherwise, consider how many people look alike and imagine all of those people start putting their hands out every time they look similar to a rendered character in a movie, tv show, video game, etc. And if you still think you own your likeness, then what happens in the case of identical twins?
That is all they would have to do to get you back (as well as some of the other die-hard Nintendo fans). But there are a lot of other people who won't buy the console at all due to the lack of third-party support. Those people are too busy playing the tons of games available for the Xbox 360 and PS3 as well as anticipating their successors. As great as Nintendo games are, it's a lot to ask of someone to buy a console where the only worthwhile titles are first-party. And it's a lot to ask of Nintendo to create enough first-party games to compete with the huge library of games available on Microsoft and Sony's systems.
The last time I stopped by my Mom's house, I was surprised to see that she had an old laptop running Ubuntu and XBMC hooked up to her TV. Apparently my uncle had the laptop laying around and decided she could use it as a home theater PC. I thought my Mom would be lost in an environment outside of Windows, but she seemed to learn the interface pretty quickly and rarely complains about it. I think with the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, and other devices with different interfaces is making users less technophobic than they used to be and they are slightly more willing to learn new interfaces. What I'm trying to say is that 2013 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Nintendo did this to themselves when they abandoned hardcore gamers to cater to casual games with the Wii. That move will always come back to bite you because the casual users are fickle while hardcore gamers will get you through the rough times. And sure enough, casual gamers have moved on to Facebook, tablets, and smartphones, and Nintendo doesn't have anyone left to sell consoles. I used to buy Nintendo consoles because I could play most of the great games available on other systems as well as Nintendo's excellent titles. But ever since the Wii, Nintendo lost most of the decent third-party developers which meant that hardcore gamers would have to buy the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 to be able to play those games. When that happened, many of the developers and the gamers haven't looked back. Luckily for Nintendo, they're still selling decent numbers of portable units, but the Wii U is in serious trouble. There's no doubt that it will pick up a bit when more first-party titles come out and after an inevitable price drop, but right now most of the hype is around the Xbone and PS4. At this point, I just don't see them making a miraculous comeback and I can't help but wonder if this is their last console. If they did another console, it would have to be absolutely revolutionary - my vote is for a fully immersive virtual reality experience, but I'm not going to hold my breath for that.
That would do virtually nothing to stop the problem of systemic bribery in our legislative process. The only thing that would change is which asshole is having his pockets stuffed with cash every few years. If you want to stop bribery, then just outlaw bribery!
I am so sick of the argument that bribing politicians and subverting the democratic process is protected under the First Amendment. It was shocking when the Supreme Court ruled that in the Citizen's United case and it's even more shocking that there exist idiots who bought into the concept. You are free to use your speech to write your current Congressman as well as support a new one in an upcoming election, but there should be strict limits against bribing candidates to gain an unfair advantage over of your views over the rest of the constituents. Many of the other civilized countries in the world already recognize the need to curtail bribing, but for some reason, we in the Land of the Free can't get enough of it.
It's not just the animations and color scheme that put me off. The monochromatic icons completely abandon the utility of color in helping to differentiate the icons. And the non-uniform tile sizes inject unnecessary visual inconsistencies (and I don't think that can be modified). And overall, the home screen is just not customizable enough to make it my own. My Android phone currently lets me display the weather, news headlines, stocks, calendar, and much more on the desktop which allows me to get a variety of different information with hardly any effort. However, I feel that the overall quality of Android is going down in the past year or two and I would be willing to switch to another platform if I could find one as flexible as Android. Unfortunately, Windows Phone does not currently fit that bill.